Pathways to food insecurity: Migration, hukou and COVID‐19 in Nanjing, China

Abstract The COVID‐19 pandemic has issued significant challenges to food systems and the food security of migrants in cities. In China, there have been no studies to date focusing on the food security of migrants during the pandemic. To fill this gap, an online questionnaire survey of food security in Nanjing City, China, was conducted in March 2020. This paper situates the research findings in the general literature on the general migrant experience during the pandemic under COVID and the specifics of the Chinese policy of hukou. Using multiple linear regression and ordered logistic regression, the paper examines the impact of migration status on food security during the pandemic. The paper finds that during the COVID‐19 outbreak in 2020, households without local Nanjing hukou were more food insecure than those with Nanjing hukou. The differences related more to the absolute quantity of food intake, rather than reduction in food quality or in levels of anxiety over food access. Migrants in China and elsewhere during COVID‐19 experienced three pathways to food insecurity—an income gap, an accessibility gap, and a benefits gap. This conceptual framework is used to structure the discussion and interpretation of survey findings and also has wider potential applicability.

Many of the world's 280 million international and 750 million internal rural-urban migrants are precariously employed in labour-intensive, low-paid (often informal), 3D (dirty, dangerous, demeaning) jobs with little employment security and limited access to social protection programmes. Although these conditions and vulnerabilities pre-date the pandemic, their consequences have been seriously exacerbated by COVID-19 (Fassani & Mazza, 2020;de Haan, 2020;Rajan, 2020;Suhardiman et al., 2021). Migrants were laid off in large numbers as businesses shut down and reduced their employment rolls in the early months of the pandemic. Those who retained their jobs were particularly vulnerable to infection in unregulated and over-crowded workplaces without adequate PPE (Landry et al., 2021;Reid et al., 2021). Migrant workers were often quarantined in over-crowded accommodation, further increasing their vulnerability to infection and death (Alahmad et al., 2020;Yee et al., 2021).
In many countries, there was a 'remittances shock' as transfers to family at home declined (Caruso et al., 2021;Takenaka et al., 2020;Withers et al. 2022). Internal urban-rural remittance flows also declined (Rajan & Bhagat, 2022). As the IMF has noted, 'sharp output contraction, together with travel restrictions in major migrant hosting economies, jeopardized migrants' employment countries and income opportunities and brought into question remittances' ability to smooth consumption in home countries' (Kpodar et al., 2021). The pandemic also imposed major constraints on international mobility, trapping migrants in destination countries as road, rail and air transportation halted and borders were closed to all but essential workers (Ullah et al., 2021). By contrast, internal migrants facing unemployment, food insecurity and COVID-19 infection began moving en masse from the cities back to their rural homes in many countries (Irudaya Rajan et al., 2020;Mukhra et al., 2020) Although there is a growing literature on the experiences of migrants during successive waves of the pandemic, the impact on migrant food security is underexplored Ramachandran et al., 2022;Sharma, 2020). In China, studies have shown the negative impact of COVID-19 on migrant employment (Che et al., 2020), remittances  and access to social protection (He et al., 2022), but have not specifically focused on the food security of migrants. The Zero-Covid policy meant that the first wave of the epidemic was relatively short-lived, although emerging research suggests that there was a general increase in food insecurity in Chinese cities (Dou et al., 2021;. In this paper, we aim to contribute to a better understanding of the complex relationship between COVID-19, migration, and food security through an analysis of the impact of the pandemic on rural-urban migrants in China. The paper also augments the literature on the migration and food security nexus during COVID-19 in three main ways. First, the paper builds on the growing body of evidence on the impact of COVID-19 on food system disruption and resilience with their associated challenges which, in China, included food price increases (Ruan et al., 2021;Yu et al., 2020), changes in household food purchasing behaviour (J. , S. Li et al., 2022Yue et al., 2021), and the dramatic growth of online food purchasing (Dai & Qi, 2020;Gao et al., 2020;Liang et al., 2022;Lu et al., 2021). Second, the paper adds to a small number of case studies of the impact of COVID-19 on household food consumption and food security in Chinese cities to expand our knowledge of the food security experience of the large Chinese urban migrant population during the pandemic (Cui et al., 2021;S. Li et al., 2022;Zhang et al., 2020;Zhao et al., 2020). Third, the paper develops a theoretical framework with broader applicability which highlights the potential pathways towards food insecurity confronting migrants during the pandemic.
The paper is organized as follows. The next section of the paper provides a contextual overview of internal migration and the Chinese hukou (household registration) system, the current state of knowledge of the impact of COVID-19 on migrants in cities, and a theoretical framework for conceptualizing the connections between migration and household food security during COVID-19. The following section of the paper describes the research methodology involved in collecting household-level data during the pandemic in the case study city of Nanjing as well as the food security indicators used in the data set. The paper then analyses the survey data using descriptive statistics and regression modelling, before concluding with recommendations for additional research.

| INTERNAL MIGRATION, HUKOU AND COVID-19
2.1 | Internal migrants and the hukou system In recent decades China has undergone a major transformation from a predominantly rural to a majority urban country (Fan, 2007;Lu & Xia, 2016;Tang, 2012). The proportion of China's population that is urbanized increased from 20% in 1980 to 64% in 2020 (National Bureau of Statistics, 2021a; State Council, 2021). Urbanization in China is closely related to the longstanding Chinese policy of hukou or household registration (K. W. Chan & Wei, 2019;K. Chan & Yang, 2020). There are two main types of urban resident: the population with local hukou in cities and those with hukou in other, predominantly rural, areas. The latter are often referred to as ruralurban migrants or the 'floating population' (Liang et al., 2014;Shen et al., 2022). Their number increased from 155 million in 2010 to 376 million in 2020 (National Bureau of Statistics, 2021a). Migrants made up 16.5% of the total population in 2010 and 26.6% in 2020. Most of China's floating population is concentrated in the country's megacities of Shanghai, Beijing, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen. About 44% of the population in cities with over five million people are migrants (K. Chan, 2019Chan, , 2021. Most migrants are employed in export-oriented manufacturing, construction, sales, domestic work, and food services. Migrants often work long hours, have little job security and few benefits. H. Cheng et al. (2020), for example, report a significant wage differential between migrant and urban workers, largely attributed to the individual characteristics and human capital levels of rural versus urban dwellers Since the 1950s, the hukou system has acted as an important determinant of the pace and spatiality of rural-urban migration and the prospects for permanent urban residence. All Chinese people are registered at birth at the local police station in the prefecture in which they are born (Luo et al., 2019). Each household has a hukou registration document which contains information on the household head, the household members, and home address. Members of households with rural hukou are not stopped from migrating to the cities to live, work or study but are categorized as nonlocal or floating (National Bureau of Statistics, 2021b). Hukou is thus both an information system of prefecture level registration and an identity label that distinguishes between local and nonlocal residents and their entitlements.
In 2014, China launched a major initiative to reform the hukou system by promoting the conversion of rural to urban hukou by migrant households (K. Chan, 2019;Government of China, 2014;B. Li et al., 2016;State Council, 2014). The conversion programme incentivizes rural-urban migrants to move to smaller cities where they can access a broader range of opportunities and benefits (Raimondo, 2019;Yang & Guo, 2018). Cities with populations between one and three million dropped all restrictions on household registration. Cities of three to five million were scheduled to relax restrictions on new migrants and remove limits on key population groups, including university graduates. By 2020, 100 million migrants had accessed the new policy (K. Chan, 2021). However, 13 cities, including Nanjing, are not scheduled for a relaxation of hukou restrictions. Although conversion is an incentive for many, not all migrants wish to convert to urban hukou (C. Chen & Fan, 2016;Hao & Tang, 2015;Tang & Hao, 2018).

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Existing studies on the impact of COVID-19 on migrant food security Holdaway (2015) draws attention to the pre-pandemic food security implications of nonlocal hukou status for migrants in cities, noting that they are 'a potentially vulnerable population in the urban context because their low incomes, long working hours and poor housing conditions limit their choice in terms of what they eat and how it is prepared'. The links between food consumption, nutritional status, and health outcomes of migrants in the city have been explored in several studies. Sun (2021) and , for example, use national survey data for over 7500 migrant households to show that urbanicity (the degree of urban infrastructure where migrants live) has a significant impact on food intake and health.  also found a significant gender effect on energy intake and its share from protein amongst migrants. Z. Cheng (2021) shows that dietary quality is positively associated with migrants' level of education.
Comparative studies include Liu et al. (2022) on variations in children's nutritional status between rural hukou households in cities and the countryside. Liao (2018) shows that in Shanghai migrant households actually have more diverse and nutritious diets than local households. Other studies have compared patterns of food consumption by migrants and local urban households and attributed differences to the hukou system (B. Chen et al., 2015;Han et al., 2019;J. Wang et al., 2021).
In early 2020, strategies to control the spread of COVID-19 had a major impact on the everyday lives and food consumption patterns of residents of Chinese cities (Zha et al., 2022;. While Wuhan was the only city to experience a complete residential and workplace lockdown, many cities implemented policies that curtailed the mobility of the population and its access to income earning opportunities, to educational institutions, and to normal food sources such as wet markets and supermarkets. Evidence is beginning to emerge that migrants in cities were especially affected. Che et al. (2020), for example, estimate that at least 30-50 million migrants lost their jobs by late March 2020. He et al. (2022) note that migrants were hard hit by layoffs in labourintensive, export-oriented industries, Zhang et al. (2021) found that 70% of migrant workers lost part of their wage income during the pandemic lockdown period and those working in small and medium enterprises were most affected. About 50% of remittance-receiving households in rural areas were adversely affected by decliningremittances with an average decline of 45%. These pandemic-related impacts on the livelihoods of migrants would, in theory, have had spin-off effects on their food security in the cities.

| Conceptualizing migrant pathways to food insecurity
Research on the impacts of COVID-19 has increasingly focused on the pre-pandemic conditions that rendered some groups more vulnerable than others to the pandemic's negative health, economic, and social consequences (Bottan et al., 2020;Cuéllar et al., 2021;Nanda, 2020;Onyango et al., 2021). In their pandemic impact typology, Katikireddi et al. (2021) propose that these inequalities produced impact 'pathways' which include initial exposure to the coronavirus, vulnerability to infection/disease, its social and economic consequences, effectiveness of pandemic control measures, and the adverse consequences of control measures. Along all these pathways, migrants working in other countries or away from home in their own countries have proven to be the most vulnerable and negatively affected (Abu Alrob & Shields, 2022;Freier & Vera Espinoza, 2021;Jesline et al., 2021;Mengesha et al., 2022;Mukumbang et al., 2020;Quandt et al., 2021;Ramachandran et al., 2022).
For this paper, we hypothesized that the prepandemic conditions and vulnerabilities of migrants generated pathways which led to greater food insecurity for migrant households and different food security outcomes to nonmigrants. For our theoretical framing, we adopted the standard FAO definition of food security as pertaining when 'all people, at all times, have physical and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food that meets their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life' (World Food Summit, 1996). Globally, the COVID-19 crisis has reduced the physical and XU ET AL. | 3 of 15 economic access of millions of migrants to sufficient, safe and nutritious food, compromised their food needs and preferences, and subverted their ability to pursue active and healthy lives (Smith & Wesselbaum, 2020).
There is a general consensus in the food security literature that the standard definition has four essential elements which we have adjusted to foreground the experience of migrant populations (Leroy et al., 2015): • Availability: there is a reliable and consistent supply of good quality food for a balanced diet for all migrants; • Accessibility: migrants have the resources to ensure physical and economic access to a healthy food environment; • Utilization: migrants are able to prepare and consume nutritious, culturally-appropriate, preferred and safe foods; • Stability: both the quantity and quality of food available and accessible to migrants remain stable over time and are not reduced by shocks and crises.
In Figure 1, we suggest that there are three main pathways to increased food insecurity for migrants during COVID-19: (i) an income pathway involving insufficient income for food purchase; (ii) a food access pathway involving poor or limited access to food outlets; and (iii) a social benefit pathway involving the absence or denial of social assistance for migrants.

| Income pathway
In circumstances of adequate food availability, level of income is the primary determinant of household food security (Babatunde & Qaim, 2010;Bashir & Schilizzi, 2013;Owusu et al., 2011). As a rule, food security improves with income even as the proportion of total income spent on food declines. In China, the level of individual and household income is therefore likely to be a key factor in the food security outcomes of households who do not have local hukou in cities. Many urban migrants were previously farmers with low levels of education and vocational skills. In the cities, migrants engage in low-skilled and physically demanding jobs with low entry barriers (K. Chan & Yang, 2020;Liu et al., 2020;Tianhong et al., 2000). Compared with other, more stable, occupations, the jobs undertaken by migrants are largely temporary and low-waged (Gu et al., 2020). The lower incomes of migrant households mean access to fewer affordable food options and a lower frequency of consuming nutritious food. As migrants are usually engaged in low-income jobs, they are more likely to be affected by the shutdown of economic activity during the COVID-19 pandemic. While income loss increases migrant vulnerability to food insecurity, so does rising food prices which make preferred foods less affordable with a reduction in dietary diversity. Combined, loss of income and rising food prices create a 'hukou-income gap-food security' path. Turner et al. (2018) define the urban food environment as 'the spaces within which food acquisition occurs, and the series of market-based opportunities and constraints that influence people's food acquisition and consumption'. In China, the central and city governments have prioritised comprehensive food environment planning that maximizes the physical and economic access of all urban residents to food markets including wet markets, supermarkets, and wholesale markets (Zhong et al., 2019. As a result, the neighbourhood food environment may not be all that different for migrants and nonmigrants although newer residential developments and higher-income areas tend to be better served. However, familiarity with the broader city food environment may vary especially as it can take time to get to know. While migrants can probably identify the food outlets in and around the areas where they shop, they probably have less knowledge of food outlets further away from where they live. In the normal course of events, this may not particularly matter for migrants. However, when their familiar F I G U R E 1 Pathways to Migrant Food Insecurity During COVID-19 food sources are abruptly closed or the quality and availability of food sold is reduced, as during the pandemic lockdown, they encounter additional difficulties accessing food and experience heightened food insecurity.

| Food accessibility pathway
Migrants may also have limited access to newer food retail sources such as neighbourhood-based group buying, which is commonly organized online through WeChat or other social media apps (Dai & Qi, 2020). Neighbourhood-based buying groups tend to be more common amongst residents with local hukou. Additionally, migrant households do not have as strong social networks as those with local hukou, as they have fewer relatives and friends in the city.
Social networks are important for accessing food and information about food, so migrants do not enjoy the same access to social network-supported food supplies. In emergencies, local households can turn to relatives and friends for help and share food channels through their networks, unlike migrants. All these relative disadvantages create a 'hukou-food market access gap-food security' path with decreased food accessibility and increased food insecurity among migrants.

| Social security pathway
Social protection programmes are an important mechanism for mitigating chronic food insecurity in normal times and averting hunger at times of crisis (Devereux, 2016(Devereux, , 2021. In Chinese cities, residents with local hukou have access to a range of social benefits which are not available to migrants (K. W. Chan & Zhang, 1999;Gu et al., 2020). For example, households with nonlocal hukou do not enjoy the same access to children's education, healthcare, and statesubsidized benefits (Afridi et al., 2015;Hung, 2022;Kuang & Liu, 2012;Niu & Qi, 2015;Song & Smith, 2019;Song & Zhou, 2019;X. Wang et al., 2017;Wu & Wang, 2014;Zhan, 2011). They also do not have the same access in urban areas to social protection programmes such as child grants, old age grants, and minimum living standards allowances. They are more likely to be able to access food for work programmes only where hukou status is not an issue.
Many cities in China also require that home buyers have a local hukou to purchase a property. When urban households buy an apartment, ownership is recorded by a property management company which runs the residential complex. Households without local hukou in the city are more likely to be tenants and are de facto excluded from registration by property management companies.
During the early part of 2020 and subsequent lockdowns, many property management companies organized emergency food group buying services for residents with recorded ownership . These difference in benefits and services by hukou make migrant households more vulnerable to food security, a path we refer to as hukou-social benefit gap-food security'.
In the remainder of the paper, we draw on the theoretical framing of pathways to food insecurity to illuminate a case study of the city of Nanjing, China. The paper addresses three basic questions about the impact of COVID-19 on migrant food security in the city: (a) Did migrant households without local hukou in Nanjing experience food insecurity in the initial phase of the pandemic and, if so, what forms did this take? (b) Were migrant households without local hukou in Nanjing more likely than those with local hukou to experience food insecurity?
(c) Which pathways to migrant food insecurity discussed in this section help to explain the food security experience of migrants in Nanjing during the pandemic? useful for identifying specific target groups (Etikan & Bala, 2017;Etikan et al., 2016).
The survey targeted all residents of Nanjing to increase the number of respondents and to potentially allow for comparisons between those with and without local hukou. In the final analysis, a total of 1445 responses were received from Nanjing residents and after screening for incomplete surveys, there were 1199 validated questionnaires. Those responses with vacant values for the variables used in this analysis were removed from the data set, leaving a total of 536 validated questionnaires. Household migration status was set as the control variable in the analysis. To distinguish between migrant and urban households, household registration status was used.
Households with Nanjing hukou were classified as local or nonmigrant. Households whose hukou was not in Nanjing were classified as migrant. A total of 431 surveyed households (80%) had Nanjing hukou and 105 households (20%) were migrants with non-Nanjing hukou.
Four main types of information were collected from respondents.
First, basic information about the household, including size, membership, structure, housing type, property rights, and hukou status was collected. Second, respondents were asked what kinds of lockdown (complete or partial) and quarantine measures their residential community had experienced. Third, the survey collected detailed information about household food purchasing and consumption in the previous month. Finally, to assess the extent of food security, all households were asked nine frequency-of-occurrence questions derived from Coates et al. (2007) and designed to capture different dimensions of household food insecurity.

| Food security metrics
The nine frequency-of-occurrence questions capture the overall level of household food insecurity in Nanjing during the COVID-19 pandemic (Table 1). These questions form the basis of two standardized and validated cross-cultural food security metrics: the Household Food Insecurity Access Scale and the Household Hunger Scale (Ballard et al., 2011;Coates et al., 2007;Leroy et al., 2015) Three additional measures were used to identify the different dimensions of food insecurity: Food Anxiety, Limited Food Quality, and Insufficient Food Quantity ( Table 2). The coding of the five food security measures used as dependent variables in the analysis was as follows: • Household Food Insecurity Access Scale (HFIAS) (Q1-9) is an overall measure of food insecurity based on all nine questions in Table 1. The frequency-of-occurrence for each question coded as 0 (Never), 1 (Rarely), 2 (Sometimes) and 3 (Often). The scale allocates each household a score ranging from 0 to 27. The higher the HFIAS score, the more food insecure the household, and the smaller the score, the more food secure the household.
• Household Hunger Scale (HHS) (Q7-9) is a secondary indicator focused on household responses to food shortages and hunger.
The scale assigns the following values: 0 (Never), 1 (Rarely/ Sometimes) and 2 (Often). The range of HHS scores is therefore 0-6. The higher the HHS score, the more intense the household experience of hunger, the lower the score, the less the experience of household hunger.
• Food Anxiety (FA) (Q1) captures the frequency of uncertainty or anxiety about the household food supply. This metric is an ordinal four-category variable: never, rarely, sometimes and always.
• Limited Food Quality (LFQ) (Q2-4) captures the quality and diversity of the household diet on a scale ranging from 0 (good quality and diversity) to 9 (poor quality and diversity).
• Insufficient Food Quantity (IFQ) (Q5-9) is a measure of whether the quantity of food to which the household has access is sufficient to meet household needs on a scale from 0 (completely sufficient) to 15 (extremely insufficient). other; (iii) food expenditure (FE) more than before COVID-19 or the same/less than before; (iv) household size (HS) of less or more than five members and (v) COVID-related medical expenditure (ME).

| Data analysis and limitations
Five multiple regression models were used to compare the food security of migrant and nonmigrant households and determine the significance of any differences between them.

| Food access
This section of the paper compares migrant and nonmigrant households in Nanjing during the early weeks of the pandemic using descriptive statistics. Table 3 compares the major food-related challenges identified by the two groups of respondents. Migrants had greater restrictions on their mobility, more restricted access to wet markets and supermarkets, and higher loss of income. Other challenges affected both groups more equally. Table 4 shows that migrants were able to access alternative food sources in roughly similar numbers as local households. For example, 53% of locals accessed online buying groups, but so did 51% of migrants. Finally, Table 5 shows the main foods whose consumption was negatively affected by the pandemic, most of which are staples in the Chinese diet.

| Migrant and local food insecurities
The analysis reveals several differences in levels of food insecurity between local households with Nanjing hukou and migrant households without Nanjing hukou (Table 7). On the various food security metrics, migrant households performed worse than local households.   Model I shows that as the number of food types affected by the COVID-19 pandemic increased, so did household food insecurity.

| Modelling food insecurity
Female-centred households and those with higher expenditures on food were also more likely to be food insecure. Larger households and households that spent more on medical needs were less likely to be food insecure.
The first three models all confirm that migrant status (the independent variable hukou) had a statistically significant impact on food security. Model 1 indicates that migrant status had a significant negative impact on the overall food security (HFIAS) score.

| DISCUSSION
The analysis in the previous section suggests that the hukou system was an important determinant of household food security outcomes in Nanjing during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. Across a variety of metrics, households without local Nanjing hukou had more negative outcomes than those with Nanjing hukou. The latter certainly felt the impact of the pandemic and experienced an overall decline in food security but the decline was not as severe overall as it   'hukou-income gap-food security' path asks if migrants experienced a loss of income, whether they were affected by food price increases, and whether these changes impacted their ability to purchase food of sufficient quality and quantity. One survey respondent replied to all these questions in the affirmative: 'There is no source of income, it is expensive to buy food, and I almost have no money to make a living' (Respondent No. 151). A minority of migrants (around 26%, slightly higher than the 19% of those with local hukou) reported lost income; but as many as three-quarters said that food was more expensive than before the pandemic. This suggests that increased cost rather than income loss was more important for most migrant households. and food purchasing and distribution by residential property management committees, local government neighbourhood committees. and volunteers. Around 44% of migrant respondents had never utilized any of these methods of procuring food. However, there was no significant difference between migrants and locals in the usage of each method. Online food purchasing grew dramatically during the pandemic, and it is a mark of the pervasive use of IT that 76% of migrants had bought food online. The primary complaints of households that used these alternative sources was that they were expensive, that the produce was insufficiently fresh, and that they had to buy multi-item food packages rather than individual products. Of the three possible pathways to food insecurity by migrant households, the income-gap path was the most important in Nanjing.
After an initial shock from a short complete lockdown, the potential food market access path was not a major challenge for most migrant households, unlike in Wuhan with its extended hard lockdown. Wet markets and supermarkets remained open in Nanjing (albeit with pandemic precautions such as strict social distancing) and many migrants had access to online food purchasing. The analysis in this paper suggests that of the various components of food insecurity, the decline in food quality was more important overall than the loss of food quantity. Migrant households experienced the greatest challenges in accessing pork, beef, fish, leafy greens, and fruits. We can infer that this was largely because of price increases that made these foods unaffordable rather than being a result of income loss. At the same time, a minority of migrant households did experience income loss and food security challenges relating to food quantity as well as quality.
These are also the households without access to emergency pandemic measures such as alternative sources of food supply and online purchasing. Without access to the temporary price subsidy programme, these households were affected negatively by the benefit gap.

| CONCLUSION
The paper is a contribution to understanding China's early pandemic experience for migrants but also offers some pointers of broader relevance. First, negative COVID-19 food security outcomes cannot be separated from the operation of the hukou system at the city scale. Internal migrants elsewhere may not face the same regulatory constraints but low-income, temporary workers in precarious employment are just as likely to experience adverse food security outcomes irrespective of place. Second, the paper suggests that the impact of COVID-19 containment on food security outcomes is likely to be more severe for migrants than non-migrants. While pandemic control and mitigation measures by central and local government in China disrupted urban food systems and led to a generalized increase in food insecurity, migrant households were especially vulnerable and had worse food security outcomes than non-migrants. This is likely to have been the case within other countries as well. Third, this study suggests that in China, a decline in dietary quality and the nutritional value of food consumed was more important than absolute food shortages for most migrant households. While this may not be as true elsewhere, it is important everywhere to use indicators that capture the different dimensions of food insecurity. Finally, this paper implies that migrants should not be treated as a homogenous group. In their small-scale study of migrants in Nanjing during COVID-19, Tang and Li (2021) suggest that it is important to appreciate differences within the migrant population in terms of access to stable employment, shelter, housing, and family and kinship support in the city and the countryside. The same applies to the experience of food insecurity as the food security impacts of COVID-19 were not equally felt by all migrants.
In the context of the issues raised in the Introduction, Orjuela- The food security impacts of the pandemic on migrants are very likely to differ across space and from place to place. Even within China, the experience and food security outcomes of the pandemic varied considerably between neighbouring Nanjing and Wuhan . This suggests that further case studies from around the globe would be invaluable in nuancing metanarratives about the impact of COVID-19 on migrant food security.
One of the key unanswered questions in most countries is whether the pandemic disruptions of early 2020 were enduring or temporary.
Have pre-pandemic levels of food security been restored or do migrant households still feel its effects two years later? This is of particular importance in building resilience to better cope with the food insecurity consequences of future waves of COVID-19 or other pandemics. Finally, the theoretical framework which guided this study highlights the role of various potential pathways to food insecurity confronting migrants during the pandemic and, as such, should be of utility to future studies of migrant food insecurity during COVID-19 in China and elsewhere. XU ET AL.